The prime catalogue of 1997 can only be Exiles and Emigres: The Flight
of European Artists from Hitler. Edited by Los
Angeles County Museum of Art curator Stephanie Barron, organizer of
the show it accompanied, and published by LACMA and Abrams, this work would
be important if only as a reminder to society today that the possibility
of holocaust is not to be ignored, a cataclysmic event that occurred relegated
to the past without possibility of recurrence. Filled with essays that recall
Nazism in Germany and its impact elsewhere in Europe and, indeed, America,
where many thousands of refugees relocated, it reflects heavily researched
studies of the period on the part of contributors and the source works on
which they drew.

Principal focus is on artists. There was Kandinsky, for example, who
earlier cooperated with the Fascists, and was reluctant to admit later that
his 1938 departure was due to politics, as essayist Keith Holz informs us.
Sabine Eckman's Considering (and Reconsidering) Art and Exile examines
the aftermath. These essays are starting points for other writers who contribute
valuable, if often little known aspects of the condition and its outcome.
They include discussion of the work of Varian Fry, not an art-world figure,
but a member of the American-organized Emergency Rescue Committee, and responsible
for the recovery of many artists and others (although he was later discharged
by the committee members who were anti-Semetic), in an essay by Elizabeth
Kessin Berman, while other writers discuss the outcome for various artists
such as Chagall, Mondrian, Dali, Leger and the many who settled, if briefly,
in New York, along with Albers at Black Mountain College and Moholy-Nagy
at the New Bauhaus in Chicago.

Vivian Endicott Barnett brings to light the matter of support for 1930s
German art in this country, and Lawrence Weschler discusses the community
of artists and intellectuals who settled in Southern California, a list
that includes several whom I recall hearing as speakers in a Thursday afternoon
lecture series at UCLA in the 1960s.

There is much here that might surprise readers, such as reference to
a portrayal of Hitler in a Fool's Cap and, in counterbalance to that, one
of Mies van der Rohe's submitting a swastika-emblazoned design at the Brussels
Worlds Fair of 1935. Jacques Lipschitz responded to events with his David
and Goliath Prometheus (1943), a work which was later destroyed because
of the controversy it aroused, but which served as an allegory of resistence
against totalitarianism. There is much valuable and enlightening reading
here, and it bestows a new level of meaning to Art History.

Scene of the Crime, with text by Ralph Rugoff, accompanied
UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum's major
contribution last year. While text cannot recreate the show, Peter Wollen's
Vectors of Melancholy compares work there with Robbe Grillet's observations
and Walter Benjamin's comments on forensic photos, and points to the connection
between crime photos and conceptual art, suggesting the artist playing a
role as surveyor of the scene.

Rugoff's More than Meets the Eye offers his concept of a forensic
idea of "process" beginning with Pollock, considers the suggestion
of criminal action that is present in Rauschenberg's Bed, as well
as in work by Yves Klein, Nikki de Saint Phale and others, and comments
on Ruscha's Royal Road Test (1966) for which a typewriter was thrown
from a moving car. He sees the suggestion of forensic in the work of many
artists, among them Baldessari, Conner, Valance, Burden and others, as well
as in Anthony Hernandez' photos of the homeless.

Bill Viola, published by the Whitney Museum with Flammarion, accompanied
another LACMA show that was one of the most
intriguing and engaging museum events during the year, and this catalogue
is a treasure. David Ross, who served as curator of the exhibition, and
was instrumental in lending video artists a serious platform while he was
a curator at the Long Beach Museum, has followed Viola's work for twenty-five
years. Ross has remained attentive to Viola's "concern for the recognition
of the sublime and the evocation of transcendent states, along with his
sense of the absurd as well as the profound." He examines a number
of works, not all of which appeared at LACMA. A conversation between Lewis
Hyde and Viola outlines the views of an artist concerned primarily with
spiritual issues in a secular world.

If the many references that pervade Carole Caroompas' work, whether
literary, sexual, personal or otherwise, need some explaining, then the
catalogue to Caroompas' Lady of the Castle Perilous, which appeared
recently at the relocated Otis College of Art
and Design Gallery by LAX, will not fail to illuminate you. Curator
Anne Ayers' The Woman Who Knew Too Much clarifies many of the literary
sources there, and probes the multidimensionality of the work. Referenced
are the artist's interests in shamanism and in feminism, her background
and biography, along with her engagement with music, in tracing the evolution
of her body of work. Notably, Ayers points to the use of myth and to her
references to Virginia Woolf, along with "that star-crossed sexy team
of Hester [Prynne] and Zorro." M.A. Greenstein's lively and entertaining
essay further considers some of the same issues along with Tibetan Buddhism,
E.R., and Caroompas' "Cirque du Soleil effort to bridge myth and reality."
Her friendly chiding not-quite-disguises a perceptive critique, if also
an admiring one, of her work as well.

"Jeff Wall" (published by the Museum
of Contemporary Art and Scalo Vering, Zurich) is the big, handsome catalogue
that accompanies the Vancouver-based artist's MOCA exhibition. Show organizer
Kerry Brougher (who has since departed MOCA for a position in the UK) acknowledges
the dual importance of Conceptual art together with a deep sensitivity to
nature, especially in reference to the landscape of the artist's native
British Columbia, in the creation of his fictional worlds.

Brougher points out the relationship between photography and painting
in the work, while noting the artist's opposition to convention in examples
such as Stereo, a depiction of a male nude in a manner customary for that
of a female. The relation, too, of the artist's photography to films such
as those by Bunuel, and the use of computers in creating the light boxes
which present the work are also discussed, along with influences that range
from Titian to Cindy Sherman.

Speaking of Sherman, the subject of the recent MOCA
retrospective provides another outstanding large-scale volume for your shelf
(published by Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art and Thames and Hudson).
Dealing with the artist's career over the last twenty years, it is loaded
with her self-portraits in disguise, Sherman serving as the subject of the
camera. The variety of images suggesting widely various personality types
are always accompanied by a level of wit. Amanda Cruz looks back at a career
which began with her Untitled Film Stills, and extending to the artist's
recent focus on the grotesque in the use of mannequins and dolls. Elizabeth
Smith discusses influences such as Goya and Bosch.

Finally, and most recently from UCLA/Armand
Hammer Museum, is Proof Positive, Forty Years of of Contemporary
Printmaking at ULAE, 1957-1987, published for the exhibition organized
by Washington's Corcoran Gallery. Following an introduction by Jack Cowell,
Tony Towle's essay recalls his experience as "secretary" at Universal
Limited Art Editions under Tanya Grossman, a role that included serving
as a printer's assistant, among multifarious duties. Here he recalls working
with such artists as Johns and Rauschenberg, while Sue Scott discusses her
work there under Bill Goldston, master printer there, and who eventually
ran both the print studio and the business. She also recalls the artists
there and the practices they undertook in executing prints.